Credit underwriting is still painfully manual.
The data that best reflects a borrower’s creditworthiness, universally, is often trapped in bank statements, financials, payslips, invoices, and other documents—not credit bureaus—and looks different for every borrower. Lenders spend hours reviewing files and chasing applicants for missing information, stretching decisions from days to months and leaving thin-file and new-to-credit borrowers especially underserved.
Today, we’re proud to announce Kita has processed more than $130 million in loan volume for lenders across the United States, Southeast Asia. and Latin America. Work that previously took credit teams days to months can now be completed in under 60 seconds.
Underwriting shouldn’t still be this hard
Kita is an AI-native credit assessment platform designed around how credit teams actually work, automating the tedious, manual work from the loan origination to the underwriting and decisioning process.
AI Credit Officer communicates with borrowers across channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, and email, helping collect information and follow up on missing requirements.
Kita Capture reads more than 50 types of financial, legal, and identity documents with local language and market context, extracting the credit information lenders need while identifying inconsistencies and potential fraud. Credit scoring from file upload for microlending
AI Underwriter applies each lender’s credit policy, analyzes the borrower, and drafts a decision-ready credit memo. Every figure can be traced back to its original source for review.
We believe AI should superpower credit teams, not replace them. By automating the work of gathering, processing, and analyzing information, Kita gives loan officers more time to focus on what matters most: making better credit decisions.
Decisions about who receives credit can shape the future of a person or business. That’s why human judgment and oversight remain fundamental to how we build Kita.
Credit inclusion central to our mission
Kita was founded out of Stanford Computer Science and shaped by time spent working with lenders in Manila. Across markets, we kept hearing the same problem: document-based underwriting was one of the biggest bottlenecks to serving more borrowers. Existing tools could automate individual steps, but few could handle the full complexity of how lenders actually assess credit.
The name Kita comes from the Tagalog word meaning both “to see” and “earnings,” reflecting our mission to help lenders see creditworthy borrowers that traditional systems overlook.
Underwriting across four markets
Kita is live in production with lenders across the Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, and the United States. What started with document underwriting has expanded into AI agents handling increasingly complex workflows across consumer, microfinance, and SME lending.
Backed by world-class investors
The round is led by BoxGroup, with participation from Y Combinator, Golden Gate Ventures, US News Digital Ventures, BEENEXT, Kaya Founders, Genting Ventures, and Apex Star Capital, the family office of Xiaomi co-founder Lin Bin.
We’re also joined by strategic angels including Shivani Siroya (Tala), Kaz Nejatian (Opendoor), Linda Du (Valon), Kulveer Taggar (Zeus), Jason Miller, and Philippine business leader Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng, alongside founders and operators from Apple, Mercor, and others.
The funding will go toward expanding our engineering team, deepening Kita’s underwriting and fraud capabilities, and supporting growing demand across Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the United States.
We’re hiring
We’re growing our team as Kita expands globally. If you want to help build the future of credit and reshape how lending works around the world, we’d love to hear from you at hiring@kita.ai.
Learn more at kita.ai.